Italy: Bosch Video Surveillance Enhances Safety on New Driverless Metro Line in Milan

The longest metro system in Italy, the Milan metro with a total length of 92 kilometers and 101 stations has a daily ridership of over one million people. To secure this important transport system, Bosch Security Systems is supporting Milan’s new driverless metro line 5, which opened earlier this year, with a security solution that combines video surveillance and public-address communication for managing passenger information and evacuation measures.

Due to the peculiarity of the city’s ancient and magnificent architecture and the resultant constraints, lines of communication between the single security components needed to be as minimally invasive as possible. This was why the decision was made to install a wireless LAN network to cover the 13 kilometers of line, along with 19 new stations, where video cameras and a public address system needed to be integrated.

The main tasks of the surveillance and evacuation solution were to provide video monitoring and passenger movement control on trains and in stations. This included providing public information while guaranteeing increased passenger control and safety, as well as the management of any system alarms and diagnostics together with continuous event recording.

Ansaldo STS, who was in charge of designing the video surveillance and public address system, supported by system integrator Tyco, chose to address the challenge with equipment from Bosch Security Systems, whose solutions have been adopted worldwide. This resulted in the installation of 400 vandal resistant FlexiDome cameras, 10-bit digital processing technology, video and audio signal transmission encoders, as well as ten iSCSI storage units. The Praesideo system was selected as the evacuation component and installed in each station, connected via LAN. All sub-systems operate independently, even in the event of a network failure or other outage, providing maximum operability and thus maximum security. Finally, all the systems supplied by Bosch were integrated via a software development kit (SDK) in the control room to form one complete solution.

This means that Milan’s fully automated M5 line can be controlled by a single operations center, which processes all the information centrally. The center is able to issue all the necessary commands to ensure the correct functioning of the line, the safety of the passengers, timely maintenance measures, and the optimum use of operational personnel (mobile agents). As a result, the Italian city can rely on modern, LAN-based security technology for intelligent traffic control coupled with the highest standard of safety.